List Of Companies That Participate In Facebook's Beacon Spy Program

By cwaltersDecember 4, 2007

One of our readers yesterday left a couple of interesting links in the comments section of our Beacon post. They provide the names of the companies that Facebook says are participating in its poorly conceived spy program Beacon. Here they are:

AllPosters.com

Blockbuster

Bluefly.com

Busted Tees

CBS Interactive (CBSSports.com & Dotspotter)

Citysearch

CollegeHumor

echomusic

ExpoTV

Gamefly

Hotwire

iWon

Joost

Kiva

Kongregate

LiveJournal

Live Nation

Mercantila

National Basketball Association

NYTimes.com

Overstock.com

Pronto.com

(RED)

Redlight

SeamlessWeb

Sony Online Entertainment LLC

Sony Pictures

STA Travel

The Knot

TripAdvisor

Travel Ticker

Travelocity

TypePad

viagogo

Vox

Yelp

WeddingChannel.com

Zappos.com

One site points out that Redlight is a mysterious addition—”I couldn’t find any site that went by that name that wasn’t an adult site.” We found something called Redlight Poker—maybe that’s the participating company?

Facebook Inc. is seeking a Canadian court order that would force Rogers Communications Inc. and Look Communications Inc. to hand over details identifying hackers who may have stolen personal information from people on the popular social-networking Web site.

The California-based company says it needs customer information from the Canadian Internet providers for a civil lawsuit it has filed against the unnamed hackers, who gained unauthorized access to Facebook’s system.

Court documents allege the hackers may have swiped personal information about Facebook members, including user names, passwords and e-mail addresses.

It is not clear how many Facebook customers were affected or where the hackers live.

I contacted facbook about this whole issue explaining that I want to see an opt-in method or at worst an opt-out. They responded by assuring me that beacon will not send anything without my approval and a bunch of other garbage.

I wrote them back and let them know that I don’t want to be pestered by every little thing I might due on a website. Haven’t heard back from them.

The main thing I want them to know is that the entire program is unsuitable for me. It seems like the facebook people have in their head that the users will just come around…there is no coming around for me. Either they disable the feature or give us an option to.

On the upside I only use three of those websites…and one very seldom…so I won’t be getting a lot of beacon requests anytime soon.

I recently ordered food from http://www.campusfood.com and it asked me if I wanted everyone to know that I had just ordered Mad Greeks Pizza. No, I’m good thanks. I’m not sure of the parent company, but it’s there.

does anyone have a link to an article with cliffs about what this Beacon thing is all about? I’ve been reading stories about how bad it is, but I haven’t seen anything that actually explains what it is doing… or “supposed to do”

I’d be mad at LiveJournal, but I’m still stuck on “bought out by a pro-Putin Russian oligarch, eliminating a major platform for free speech in Russia and, also, will I still be allowed to post pictures of shirtless Putin?”

Once again, blocking Beacon using the technique in the WikiHow article DID NOT WORK for me. (I double-checked that I had followed instructions properly.) Allposters tried to send a story to my news feed anyway.

The one site on that list that really bothers me – even though I don’t use it – is Kiva. Is Facebook really going to say “John Smith lent $25 to a small business in Bangladesh”? WTF?

I was surprised about Kiva, too, but then I remembered that on the Causes application, if you give money, it registers on the application itself(there’s a line that says $X donated”.) I’m guessing that’s why they’re linked?

Also, funny related story on NYT: Zuckerburg wants his privacy when information points to his stealing Facebook’s code and idea from fellow students. He wants to opt out of having those documents shared? Aww, that’s precious.

@phantomfly: Sorry it didn’t work for you. I did notice a typo in the Wikihow:

Where it says type in “http*://*facebook.com/beacon/*”, you should really type in “http://*facebook.com/beacon/*” (of course without the quotes). Note that it incorrectly instructs you to put in an additional asterisk after the http, but in the image, shows that’s not the right code — use the one in bold here.

@hiphopnerd: Odds are that facebook installs a cookie that identifies you with a unique user number or something (thus this only working if you tell Facebook to “remember you” at login). Beacon participants probably look for this cookie, and then send Facebook the activity info paired with your user number. Facebook matches the user number to a user, and there you go.

All in all, the best way to make this a non-issue is to just cancel your Facebook account, if you have one. Facebook is pretty useless anyway, I don’t understand why so many people have so much difficulty dumping it.

I’m still loving the double standards associated with social networking. No one is afraid to submit all kinds of personal data to a website over an unsecure connection with the potential of it easily being sniped by a third party, but everyone’s up in arms about a service which discloses purchasing and surfing habits to the same community they’ve already given all their information to? Silly.

going by what is says on the facebook website about beacon its added to the webpage’s of the companies that opt in

Add 3 lines of code and reach millions of users.

Simply determine which user actions you would like publish to Facebook and add a few lines of code to your web page. Facebook Beacon actions include purchasing a product, signing up for a service, adding an item to a wish list, and more. When a user performs the action, they will be alerted that your website is sending a story to their profile

That would make sense…but then how does that correspond to the statement that some of those analyzing the code have said- that the partner sites are sending everyone’s info, whether they belong to facebook or not?

I have a hard time dumping Facebook simply because it has friends that I don’t see on MySpace, and friends that I don’t really want to share with on MySpace. However, the interface (and now this) are thoroughly horrible and annoying. The only company on that list I use is LiveJournal, and even that I only have to read, not to post.

I may have to look at who I really care about on Facebook and then terminate my account after contacting them.

@kimsama & @Andy S.: That’s the sketchball thing, the information is being collected regardless of your use of the website. if you can track down the legit TOS and not the dumbed down, non legal one on their site you’ll see it mentions that they reserve the right to collect information about you from various sources regardless of your use of the website.

@othium: Apparently you would have to delete each and every album, wall post, etc and withdraw from every group — if you deactivate and then sign back on with the old username and password, it apparently still has all your data:

Facebook does allow people to ‘deactivate’ their accounts. This means that most of their information becomes invisible to other viewers, but it remains on Facebook’s servers – indefinitely.

This is handy for anyone who changes their mind and wants to rejoin. They can just type their old user name and password in, and they’ll pop straight back up on the site – it will be like they never left.

I deleted (not just deactivated) my account yesterday. I was an early adopter, but the clutter on the site and now this have pushed me over the edge. Yes, it was a useful way of tracking people, but it’s not worth dealing with it now that it’s turned evil.

I emailed privacy@facebook.com and asked them to remove all of my data information from their servers, since “deactivating” my account seemed exactly the same as logging out. I got some form reply, but after a couple of emails back and forth I was finally told that in order to get my information erased, I should:

I recieved an email back stating that my information had been erased from their servers, and sure enough I was told that I needed an account to log in. Whether I was truly erased or not I’m not sure, but I certainly can’t log in using my old user name/pw. Good riddance to bad luggage, I say.